Year of the Four Emperors

Kenneth Wellesley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415232289
• eBook ISBN: 9781134562275
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

After Nero's notorious reign, the Romans surely deserved a period of peace and tranquility. Instead, during AD69, three emperors were murdered: Galba, just days into the post, Otho and Vitellius. The same year also saw civil war in Italy, two desperate battles at Cremona and the capture of Rome for Vespasian, which action saw the fourth emperor of the year, but also brought peace. This classic work, now updated and reissued under a new title, is a gripping account of this tumultuous year. Wellesley also focuses on the year's historical importance, which also marked the watershed between the first and second imperial dynasties.

1

Prospect and Retrospect

On I January A.D. 69, in the eight-hundred-and-twenty-first year of the City, the emperor Servius Sulpicius Galba Caesar Augustus and Titus Vinius Rufinus entered office as consuls, the former for the second time.

At the start of the year a careful ritual was observed to ensure success in public and private affairs. The first words you spoke on rising in the morning, the first actions performed within the house must be happy and uncomplaining. Laurel and saffron, around the door or burning on the little household altar, would bring luck. Outside in the city, the temples, normally kept shut, were open to worship, and fire burned on the altars that stood before them. But this was no holiday. As the year started, so would it continue. One must be up and doing. By all means visit and receive your friends; exchange good wishes and little gifts of dates, figs and honey to sweeten the coming year; but then off to work. Wherever Roman citizens lived throughout the circle of the lands, everything done and said would—or might—set the pattern for the year: above all at Rome itself, head and mistress of a civilized and peaceful world. In the capital city the solemn and annual procession of Roman notables was once more to make its way up to the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest to seek a blessing on the community.*

No rational observer could possibly have suspected the anger of the gods. No one could have supposed that the great triple shrine on the hill towards which the company moved would in this year sink into ashes and rubble, a symbol no longer of Rome’s eternity but of its seemingly imminent extinction. That Italy should be twice invaded by Roman armies, that its cities and capital should be taken by storm, that three successive emperors should die by assassination, suicide or lynching, and that the whole empire, from Wales to Assouan and from the Caucasus to Morocco, should be convulsed and disarrayed, were matters beyond imagination or surmise. More than a century, after all, had passed since the bad old days of the republic. Yet the long and single year now beginning would provide a spectacle of calamity, endurance and survival without parallel, so far, in Rome’s history.

Within the structure of the Roman principate instituted by Augustus the ghost of the republic lived on in formalities. Annual magistrates, or magistrates in relays within the year, were still elected by, and accountable to, the whole citizen body. Occasionally, to honour his fellow-senators or a particular friend, the emperor himself, as now in 69, assumed the consulship. So early in the day the crowds had gathered in the Forum Romanum near the palace, the senator wearing his heavy, newly-fulled and pure-white woollen toga over the broad-stripe of his tunic, the patrician shod with scarlet shoes, cross-gartered. Of the total of 500 or so senators perhaps 300 were present on such a special occasion—all those not hindered by illness or absent on the public service in or outside Italy. Then there were representatives of the middle class of ‘knights’: men rich enough in simpler days to afford the expense of mounted service in the army, now merchants, bankers and contractors, men of solid financial status, second estate in a community where rank and privilege were not imagined to be incompatible with the liberty of the individual. These men you could distinguish by the narrow purple stripe beneath the toga. Next, the populus Romanus at large: artisans, shopkeepers, labourers, servants, farm folk in for the day from the nearby country; and almost as numerous and not outwardly distinguishable, the freedmen and the unfree, immigrants or indigenous, climbing to citizenship. The ceremony was rather a special one: Nero’s successor, old Servius Galba, had only two months before come with Vinius from Tarragona in Spain, and the public was still curious about the newcomer.

The emperor had blue eyes, a hooked nose and a square jaw; he had lost most of his hair. Of medium height and stocky build, he walked with a limp, victim of arthritis in foot and hand, so that he found it difficult to unroll or even hold a book. After Nero, who had died at the age of thirty, an emperor in his seventies must have seemed strange. Yet, as Romans had already discovered, Galba was no weakling in character. His was the green and vigorous old age of a man who had never lived a soft life. His manner suggested the habit of authority and a capacity to rule. He was no stranger to greatness.¹*

The palace he had known from childhood, changed though it now was by the building activities of Gaius and Nero. As he emerged from it, descended the steps, and walked down the ramp leading to the Forum, he must surely have thought back over the years to the first day of his first consulship, when by favour of the dowager-empress Livia, Augustus’ widow, he had been allowed, though not really a member of the imperial family, to show himself to Rome from the palace on his way to the Capitol. Now, thirty-six years later, he did so in his own right. The prophecy of Livia’s son, the second emperor Tiberius, had been strangely fulfilled: he had once called the young Galba to him, asked him a number of questions and finally produced as horoscope a short sentence in Greek: ‘One day, my boy, you too shall have a brief taste of power.’ This was the kind of prediction that one believed after the event; but the event, incredibly, had happened.

The procession formed up as Galba and Vinius, dressed in the purple and embroidered togas of consuls, appeared in public. Ahead moved the knights, alongside were the senators and, immediately preceding the consular pair, their lictors, each with the traditional bundle of rods strapped round an axe and supported in left hand and on left shoulder. Behind Galba and Vinius were carried the ceremonial Etruscan folding stools of metal inlaid with carved ivory, the simple thrones of Roman magistrates. The apparatus of the age-old sacrifice was there: priests, herald, flute player, victimarius, assistant and young boy (both his parents of course must be alive), together with the victims: white oxen from the Faliscan heights or the watery plain of Clitunno,* their horns gilded. At the foot of the slope the company turned to the left, away from Nero’s columns and the 120-foot statue of the vanished megalomaniac which stood before the Golden House, and moved north-westwards towards the Capitol, past Julius’ basilica and the high podium of the Temple of Saturn, and up the steep slope of the paved, slightly curving way that led along the south face of the Capitoline Hill. Once through the gate and into the sacred area, they squeezed into position among the columns fronting the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. Within the doorway of the central shrine, that of Jupiter, Galba and Vinius took their places for the first time upon their sellae curules, facing outwards to the altar, the assembly and the roofs of Rome.²

It was necessary to take the auspices and make sure, as far as possible, that heaven would accept the coming sacrifice. The cage containing the sacred chickens, kept conveniently hungry, was superintended by a special official, the pullarius. Gossip afterwards alleged that the birds scuttled away instead of greedily pecking at the cakes of pulse thrown to them. If true, this was a bad sign—and during the actual sacrifice Galba’s laurel garland slipped from his head. But no doubt the pullarius was equal to the emergency. He reported in due course that the birds had fed. The altar fire crackled with saffron, casting a slight glow on the gilded coffers of the shaded pronaos. In the presence of the toga’d consuls, and of the Senate and People of Rome, keeping holy silence, the purple-veiled priest offered prayers for the state, formulae carefully repeated from a written exemplar and checked for correctness by a listener appointed for the purpose. Any slip of the tongue, any stumble or mispronunciation vitiated the proceedings; to drown unlucky noises a piper played. Then the head of the ox was sprinkled with meal by the priest, and turned sideways; the animal was felled or its throat was slit; the victim was disembowelled and the entrails laid upon the altar. Only if the ritual repeated undeviatingly that of past years could another year of success be expected to take its place in the long tale. Afterwards came a second offering, this time made by the twelve Brethren of the Fields, an ancient and exclusive body, of which the emperor was president, and whose members constituted a kind of order of chivalry. Its origin lay in the remote and unknown past, when Rome or some other Italian community was a little town dependent on the yield of a little land—a yield that might be guaranteed by piety or magic. Now a few nobles carried on the fossilized rituals, celebrating clubbable occasions with a certain pageantry at Magliana down the Tiber or at Rome itself.³

The ceremony concluded, the procession re-formed and descended the slope it had climbed. The consuls, magistrates and senators made their way to the Senate House in the north-east corner of the Forum for the first meeting of the year. Here the magistrates, and then each senator in turn, swore an oath to observe the ordinances of the sacred Augustus and his successors, and to be faithful and true to Servius Galba, Emperor, Caesar, Augustus, Pontifex Maximus, Holder of the Tribunician Power, Father of His Country.

As Galba gazed around at the great assembly gathered to pay homage, the thought of the events of the past nine months gave him satisfaction: a sense of gratitude that, late though it was, he had been chosen to end a long political decline. He had not fallen a victim to the dagger of Nero’s assassin after all, and the prophecy of greatness had not been in vain. Almost overnight, a hundred-year-old dynasty had vanished, its place taken by himself: old, childless, a widower, a blunt soldier, he had yet become, while governor of Nearer Spain, the choice of the troops, the Senate and, by tacit consent, the world. There would be renewal and reform.

Certainly Rome could not have endured Nero much longer; his death, self-inflicted in unbalanced and perhaps premature despair, signified the end of the Julio-Claudians, for he had no son. The last ten years had seen a series of disasters and disgraces: the murders of Agrippina and Octavia, the fire of Rome, the conspiracy of Piso with the enforced deaths of Seneca and Lucan, the virtual execution of Corbulo, Nero’s tour of Greece as charioteer and poet, and finally the revolt of Vindex and of Galba himself. By 68 no prominent Roman could be sure that he would not be the next to be struck by the bolt of an insane Jupiter: service and obedience like Corbulo’s were themselves fatal. Galba, too, had believed that his life was in danger, and had connived at the treasonable plans of Julius Vindex, governor of Central Gaul, who had written to him for his support. Instead of transmitting the correspondence to Rome as strict duty required, he had maintained it. In March, Vindex rose; and early in April, Galba’s troops at Cartagena, clearly with his permission, had saluted their commander not as ‘Caesar’s Legate’ but as ‘Caesar’. Galba preferred for the moment to regard himself as an officer of the Senate and People of Rome, a comparatively prudent form of protest against Neronian autocracy. Perhaps, even now, some semblance of the old liberty would be restored.

In Spain Galba was liked and respected for his strict but just rule. In eight years the people had grown attached to the old noble who stood no nonsense and believed in principles of honesty, duty and discipline. They welcomed his proclamation, which was supported by Titus Vinius Rufinus, latterly an upright governor of Southern Gaul, by Caecina Alienus, financial secretary in Southern Spain, and by the neighbouring province of Lusitania. Its governor, Marcus Salvius Otho, had been husband or lover of Poppaea before she became empress, and he had his own compelling reasons for disliking Nero, who had sentenced him to a ten-year stretch of virtual exile in this remote Atlantic province. Thus Otho, once the friend and associate of Nero, was one of the first provincial governors to go over to Galba, and, as he did so, the thought of succeeding the old man at no very distant date cannot have been absent from his calculations. He was still only thirty-seven, still remembered in Roman society. He could consider his future prospects good. But all these hopes of Galba, Otho and Vinius received a rude shock at the end of May. The governor of Central Gaul was dead, his rebellion crushed.

When Vindex rose against Nero in March, he had no legions at his disposal. He had gathered together some kind of militia force from the Gallic tribes, and finding his capital of Lyon too firmly attached to Nero and the Rhineland legions, many of whose veterans had taken up residence in the city they knew so well, had set up his headquarters at Vienne, eighteen miles downstream. From here he conducted an unsuccessful siege of Lyon. In May, hearing that Verginius Rufus, commander of the legions of Upper Germany, had assembled a force in Mainz from all the Rhine legions and auxiliaries to deal with him, Vindex went to meet him when he besieged Besançon, the capital of the Sequani, a vital stronghold in a tight loop of the Doubs. By a misunderstanding, it seems, a conference between the two governors, Vindex the enemy of Nero and Verginius the ambiguous constitutionalist, had become a confrontation between their two armies. There was a fight outside Besançon which ended in a débâcle for Vindex, who committed suicide. But in this confused situation, Verginius himself was repeatedly offered the principate by his troops, and had repeatedly—but with varying degrees of decisiveness—rejected it.

For Galba the situation was now obscure and alarming. He had only one legion, the Sixth. However, he put a bold face on the matter, appointed a young and vigorous officer, Quintus Pomponius Rufus, later consul and provincial governor, to patrol the coast of Nearer Spain and Southern Gaul against a possible naval attack by Nero, and recruited infantry and cavalry among the sturdiest inhabitants of his province, notably the Basques and the mountaineers of north-west Spain. On 10 June at Glunia, near Coruña del Conde, in Old Castile north of the Upper Duero and not far from a site famous in Roman history—Numantia—he presented its eagle to a new legion, the Seventh (Galbian). The ceremony would have been a happier one if Galba had known that on the previous or following day the Senate had recognized him as emperor. Within a week he heard the news from his confidential servant Icelus, who travelled fast. The whole of Rome had put on the cap of liberty, like slaves manumitted in Feronia’s temple.⁴

Quite apart from his following in the west, Galba must have seemed to the Senate in June 68 an unobjectionable, indeed highly desirable, candidate for the principate. He came of a rich and noble family, had a career of public service behind him and was believed to possess old-fashioned virtues, still, for instance, summoning his servants twice each day to exchange morning and evening greetings individually. Despite his years he was full of vigour. In the nature of things, however, he could scarcely be expected to live long: and this too was a commendation. Galba would certainly serve as a stop-gap, and his remoteness from Rome would give the Senate time to think and debate, time perhaps to wipe off scores long chalked up. A greater contrast between the late emperor and the present one could scarcely be imagined. After his first consulship under Tiberius at the age of thirty-six, he had been governor of South-West Gaul, general officer commanding the military district of Upper Germany, victor over the Chatti in 41, participant in the invasion of Britain in 43, proconsul of Africa (roughly modern Tunisia), and for the last eight years governor of Nearer Spain. Galba’s memories reached back to the divine Augustus himself, who had pinched his childish cheek in playfulness. Livia Augusta and Tiberius, as we have seen, had been his friends. Neither Rome nor the rest of the empire had any hesitation in accepting the new Augustus, however novel his rise to power. So, like the creator of the principate, he could claim that though nominated by the army he had been accepted by the Senate and People, that he was a democratic emperor.

By late summer, having dealt summarily with a few obdurates, notably the governor of Africa, Clodius Macer, who had thought to dislodge Nero by cutting off the corn supply upon which the capital was heavily dependent, the new emperor was ready to leave Tarragona for Rome. A route march would toughen up his troops, and have the advantage of showing the flag in southern Gaul and northern Italy. Only the new legion, VII Galbiana, accompanied him; but as was fitting, a sovereign’s escort of the Praetorian Guards had been sent out from Rome by sea. Dislodged from comfortable ceremonial duties in the capital or the seaside resorts around the Bay of Naples, these fine warriors now found themselves toiling up the slopes of the Pyrenees and the Alps in the company of raw Spanish legionaries and a lame emperor riding in a carriage often shared by Otho. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus,* a bright young rhetorician who, after study in Rome, had recently returned to his home at Calahorra, travelled with the column: Galba himself was a man of few words, and it would be useful to have a speech-writer on hand. At Narbonne, at the beginning of August, Galba had been met, very properly, by an honorific deputation of senators. He entertained them at an official banquet, and the guests were surprised, and perhaps pleased, to note that no use was made of the splendid plate despatched from Rome: they were to dine off the more modest equipment of a serving officer’s canteen. The march was orderly and uneventful. Wherever he appeared, Galba received a cordial welcome from the populace, who now, after many years, saw in their midst an emperor who corresponded with their ideal. This esteem for Galba was indeed to survive him and become a political force used by others. In late September or early October—no precise dating is possible—came the entry into Rome. It was slightly marred by a fracas caused by some Neronian recruits for whom Galba said he had no employment.⁵

The Senate had given him a good reception. It was true, of course, that the exuberance marking the first few months of senatorial liberty of speech had now to be decently muted in the presence of the new master. A determined and bigoted republican, Helvidius Priscus, had already commenced a vendetta against those involved guiltily, as he thought, in the trial and condemnation two years before of his father-in-law, the respected Thrasea Paetus. Even good emperors, however, welcomed a certain moderation in public expressions of opinion, and it is certain that the orators of the immediate post-Neronian days had not minced their words. Neronian exiles had returned clamouring for justice and retribution. More than once it was necessary for a Roman emperor to deprecate recrimination of this sort. Inevitably such squabbles were unwelcome to the man who, in the last resort, bore the responsibility of running the world, and had despite past associations to employ such talent as was available. The constitution of the Roman state entrusted large and imprecise authority to its emperor, shared with Senate and People. Towards the end of the year 68, it seemed that power was once more being concentrated in the hands of the emperor, or rather, as some critics believed, of a small coterie of privy councillors and civil servants, accountable only, if at all, to the emperor. Behind a republican façade, which seemed to proclaim that power was delegated by the Roman people, the operation of the imperial prerogative demonstrated that it was in fact delegated by the Augustus.

As for the Roman mob, for them there would be fewer cakes and less ale. The days of lavish largesse and spectacle were past. More intelligent or better informed observers must have realized that the state treasury was empty, and that, Galba or no Galba, there would have to be economies. Nero had squandered enormous sums on acting, architecture and athletics. Galba ordered the recipients of the imperial bounty to be sent demands for repayment of 90 per cent of what they had received. But they had barely 10 per cent left, for they had spent other people’s money as freely as their own, and no longer disposed of any real estate or capital investments: only the minor trappings of dissipation remained. The collection of the money was to be supervised by an equestrian committee of thirt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Plates
• Preface
• Sources
• Place-Name Equivalents in Latin and the Vernacular Languages
• Introduction
• 1 Prospect and Retrospect
• 2 The Five Days’ Caesar
• 3 Caecina and Valens
• 4 Otho’s Reaction
• 5 The First Battle of Cremona
• 6 Vitellius’ March to Rome
• 7 Flavian Hopes
• 8 The Second Battle of Cremona
• 9 Antonius Moves South
• 10 Rhine and Nile
• 11 The Battle of Rome
• 12 The Last Ten Days
• Abbreviations and Notes
• Index